by James Haley
It had been weeks since they sent the Five Points on Captain Carroll’s angry way without his field artillery that was expected by the Mexicans at Cópano; even more weeks since they had lightened the Mary Ellen of her muskets and lead and powder. Their ship, although her true identity and nationality were not known, had been seen in New Orleans and Galveston, and speculation about them was sure to be lively. The Mexican navy had nothing to match their guns, but undoubtedly a call for privateers had brought in a fleet of fortune-seekers. If they had been declared pirates, they would be hunted by American privateers as well—not just for their value as a prize but for a large reward as well, offered by the insurers of the cargoes they had interdicted. In no circumstance did he see an advantage to showing American colors. They had patrolled their station off Cópano for three weeks, and the paucity of vessels attempting to enter there made it clear to him that their presence was deduced. That was well, for their mission was to close Cópano to the Mexicans as a port of entry to supply their army in Texas, and at this they had succeeded. Now that they had come back up the coast to try to learn news of the war, these two ships could belong to anyone. They could learn as much by flying the Texian flag as they could the American, especially since the name Gonzales emblazoned on her stern could give the lie to their false colors, with unknown consequences. Bliven’s pulse quickened with a further thought, a variable that had not previously occurred to him: that the Texians, as Houston had told them, were assembling their own small fleet. If the approaching vessels were themselves Texian, and loyal to the secretary of the navy of whom Houston had warned him, that failed American midshipman named Potter, and if they ordered his surrender, he could be in the unenviable position of having to fight ships of the country he had been sent to help.
The Gonzales fell into quiet readiness, a pause that lengthened into reflecting again upon all the deafening noise and violence and bloodshed of a sea battle, and on the agonizing slowness with which they sometimes developed. Bliven loved having it among his memories that he had been on the Constitution during Hull’s thrilling three-day kedging escape from that British squadron, but those had been three days in which their hair had been standing on end, with the issue undecided. And now here they were, bristling like a porcupine, awaiting the intentions of these two ships, which for all they knew might simply sail away and leave them unsatisfied and unknowing of anything.
“Ahoy the deck!”
“What do you see?”
“Two ships, southeast, three miles. One is rigged fore-and-aft . . . appears to be a large schooner! The other, I see smoke and no sail; I think she must be a steamship!”
Such news sent White and Bliven back to the starboard railing, their glasses raised. Suddenly Bliven found himself repenting that he had placed twenty-fours only on the bow as chasers. A steamship he would outgun, but in this light wind it could run circles around him and shoot where he could not shoot back—most disastrously raking fire through his tall glassy stern.
“I can’t say I like this,” said White.
“Nor I,” said Bliven.
“Ahoy the deck! They show Mexican colors!”
“Well, that answers everything.” Potter and his call to all ships to arrest them might have presented the greater threat numerically, but if they were Mexican ships, they might have been at sea as long as he and have no more idea than he whether the war was over. He had never yet heard a sailor, lying on the deck with his blood pouring out onto the planks, ask whether a war was over. Between himself and these two oncoming Mexican cruisers, the war was very much on. “Mr. McKay, they may have the weather gage but I’ll not show them my ass!” Bliven felt his blood rising, that electric energy shooting through him with such force that he wondered every time, every battle, that he did not glow in a blue aura with St. Elmo’s fire. Yes, this was what kept him coming back to sea when the civilized part of his nature yearned for his wife and his farm. It was an addiction, as surely as alcohol or laudanum could be an addiction, but he would have to consider this later. “Mr. McKay, a nice northerly turn, now, then come back to the west. Mr. Yeakel—”
“I follow you, Captain!” In the instant he had men trimming the sails, laying the yards hard over on the starboard tack. With luck they could even manage a few degrees south of west.
“Ahoy the deck! The two ships are separating!”
“Are they changing course?”
“No, sir! They are coming for us but opening a distance between themselves!”
Bliven walked to the wheel. “Mr. McKay, I do not like being this close to the shore. They mean to make us fight both sides of the ship at once. The wind is not very favorable, but I wish you could open some distance from the coast; we could run with them for a while and oblige them.”
“Sir.” Yeakel came up with them. “If it is a schooner and a steamship, they cannot mount more than maybe three guns on a side. If they make us fight both sides, we will still outgun them four to one.”
“Except one is a damned steamship,” said McKay. “He will lay abaft where we canna’ get to him and play hell with us.”
“Then your job, Mr. McKay,” said Bliven, “is to keep turning and not give him a clean raking shot through our stern windows.”
McKay pointed toward the open water. “We canna’ turn south, sir. We can foil him for a while, but it means turning north and west and north and northeast. Eventually we must run aground.”
“Well, let us string them along as far as we can. We may inflict such damage that they might retire before that occurs.” He looked up at the green silk pennant that began to fall limply with a pause in the wind, and at Houston’s gold star on a blue field, wondering just for a second if the general had been able to work his will on the Texian authorities to adopt it. “Mr. White, we are opposite the port of Velasco, are we not?”
“We are, sir.”
Do not touch our shore again, Houston had told him, except to save your lives. That could prove prophetic. “Mr. White, pass the word among the men to gather for a moment beneath the hatch.
“Well, boys,” he addressed them loudly, adopting Sam’s manner of informality, “I will tell you how it is. Even though there are two ships against our one, we nevertheless vastly overmatch them. In the highly unlikely event we are bested, I will get you as close to shore as we can, and the people in Velasco will take care of you. However, once these two ships count our guns and take note of their caliber, I expect they will retire and we will have to chase them. Are you ready for a chase?”
He was answered by a cheer from the gun deck, with fists thrust into the air. “Very well, then. To your stations now,” he said, pointing at them suddenly. “And no daydreaming about all the land you will be awarded for making this day’s fight. All right, lads?”
Again they cheered him, and turned back to their gun stations. He felt for a moment almost like old Preble, and lifted his hat to them when they cheered. He joined Yeakel by the wheel with McKay. He wished Sam were with him, for this was a very small team to command in a fight. “Gentlemen, look there. The steamship is heading upwind astern of us, where we can’t turn on him, and the schooner is angling to get ahead of us to cross our bow. They mean to rake us, bow and stern. It is capable thinking; in their place I might do the same thing. Mr. McKay, maintain your course west by south. We will allow the schooner to think he will cross us. At my command, you turn hard astarboard and come to a northerly heading. Mr. Yeakel, pass this on to Mr. White and tell him to give the schooner our port broadside as we turn. Mr. McKay, after we fire upon the schooner, mark the position of the steamship and continue your turn to place him straight on our starboard beam, and Mr. White will give him our starboard broadside. Is all this clear? Mr. Yeakel, go tell him and hurry back.”
As the schooner approached, it was clear that she was a privateer. She was light and fleet but built with no internal strength. Pirates and privateers—when had there ever b
een a half dime’s worth of difference between them? They would never learn, it seemed, the folly of mounting guns on platforms that could take no punishment. It seemed a shame to wreck such a pretty craft. She cut through the Gulf swells using her speed and position to come two points off their port bow and two hundred yards ahead.
“Hard astarboard, Mr. McKay! Mr. White, get ready!”
McKay wrestled the big double wheel with all his considerable strength, and the Gonzales answered with a ponderous heel and gain in speed as she came before the wind and Yeakel’s crew trimmed the sails to catch it. As soon as she recognized what was happening, the schooner fired her three guns, banging like twelve-pounders, and peeled off to port. But before McKay completed the turn White fired his crushing broadside, eleven twenty-fours in a rolling broadside as they bore, the entire side of the Gonzales erupting in flame and smoke. The guns farthest forward and aft necessarily passed on either side of the heeling schooner, but the balls fired from her midships struck home, one into her cabin, two into the hull, and one carried away part of her rudder. Through his glass Bliven saw her steering ropes fly up into the air, but with her fore-and-aft rigging she was still able to ride the wind westward swiftly until she was out of range. No doubt the crew was working frantically to get the ropes back around the wheels and get her under control.
McKay finished his turn, but the puffing steamship proved swifter than they had anticipated, and she loosed her raking broadside, heavier eighteen-pounders that tore at an angle into their stern. They heard glass shatter beneath them; they heard bulkheads being smashed. Shrieks and groans of the wounded issued up through the hatch, and then an unholy crash of metal and a curl of smoke rose through the hatch.
The Gonzales answered with her starboard broadside, fired all at once with a stupendous roar, and with the steamer only a hundred and fifty yards off; they could almost see the ship bend and give beneath the weight of shot that slammed into her.
Bliven dashed over to the hatch. “Mr. White! What has happened?”
“Sir, two of our guns have been unseated; six of the men are being taken down to Dr. Haffner. I do not know how badly they are hurt.”
“Are your other guns all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Reload, man! Reload!”
“We are at it, Captain!”
“Mr. McKay, I want you to go east. That steamer is by far the larger threat. I want another broadside, into his other side, before he recovers from the first.”
“Aye, sir, understood.” McKay muscled the wheel to starboard, but as they passed inshore of the steamer, and with White still reloading, the steamer turned as if on bearings and fired their own waiting starboard broadside, three more eighteens, at close range. They heard one ball sing as though it were coming right at them, striking and shivering the mizzenmast six feet over their heads, one holing them low on the berth deck, between wind and water, the third crashing through and wrecking the wardroom.
Bliven leaned again over the open hatch. “Mr. White, are you not ready?”
“Just now, sir!”
“Then in God’s name, fire!”
Their starboard broadside thundered again, but as the steamer had finished his own turn, it presented them with a target only as wide as his beam, bow on. Then they saw a flash on her bow and the bang of a twelve-pounder, and realized that she mounted a chaser. It might be a ball; it might be grape.
“Down!” Bliven shouted, even as he dove for the deck. The ball they dodged crashed through the binnacle and straight into the wheel; if McKay had not dropped to the deck he would have been cut in half. There was a mighty crash of wood as the wheel backed off its spindle and lay flat upon the deck.
Bliven puzzled, “Now what?”
Yeakel was getting to his feet. “Sir, the sails are already on the port tack; the wind will carry us to the shore.” With no steering force on the rudder, indeed, they already sensed their bow nosing around to the north, and they beheld the steamer, hurt but still dangerous, coming north also, but now several hundred yards off, wary of their overwhelming broadside. They looked ahead and saw people, several score of them now, lining the beach.
In another moment they felt the ship shudder to a halt, and with the ship no longer in motion, the pull on the standing rigging became too much for their long-suspect foremast, the lines snapped, and with majestic slowness it lay down upon the fo’c’sle.
“Mr. Yeakel, we are aground. The water is too shallow to sail and too deep to wade ashore. Get all your boats down and tie them on well. All hands to the hatch!”
Yeakel and White both took up the call until everyone still below gathered at the foot of the ladder, with Bliven above them looking into the hatch.
“Boys, they have been lucky. Our game is just about played out, but all is not lost, for we are at a friendly shore. Now, I want those of you who are good swimmers to ease yourself over the port side and strike out for the beach. Look and you will see even now a crowd of civilians waving you in to give you aid. Those who cannot swim will stay and man the guns until there is no more fighting to be done. Then you will get into the boats and we will row ourselves ashore.” A thick column of smoke began to rise from the ladder down to the berth deck.
Not two minutes after a hundred and twenty men took to the water, McKay called to him: “Captain, the Mexican steamer is lowering boats as well! They must mean to overtake our men swimming ashore.”
Bliven raised his glass and stared in horror at the sight of Mexican marines with their Brown Bess muskets, seated in longboats, motionless as toy soldiers on a table, being eased down to the water. “No, no, no. Don’t they know I will lay a covering fire? My God, I don’t want to kill all those men!”
“Aye,” said McKay, “but that other captain is the one making the sacrifice, not you. You must protect your own.”
“I know that, of course.” He jogged to the edge of the hatch overlooking the gun deck. “Mr. White!”
“Sir?”
“That steamer is within the limit of your range?”
“Yes, sir, barely.”
“Your starboard guns, how many are this moment loaded with solid shot?”
“All of them, sir.”
“You have seen them lowering boats to catch our men before they can get ashore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, point your guns as best you can and give him your broadside. When you reload, do so with grape and train upon their boats. They must come closer to overtake our own men. Do you understand?”
“That will be a slaughter, sir.”
“It is not my choice; our men must get ashore. I will take charge of the bow chasers myself and see what I can work with them. Mr. Yeakel!”
“Sir?”
“Take some men off the forward port battery and get them down to the berth deck and do something about that fire!”
“Yes, sir!”
“What the hell happened, anyway?”
“One ball of their raking fire made it all the way down to the camboose and tore it apart, including the firebox. Some of the hot coals fell down the hatch and touched off some linens and bedding.”
“Bedding? Why was it not rolled and stowed? Oh, never mind! Now listen to me. Have we taken on any water?”
“Just a little, sir.”
“You must beat the fire well away from the ladder. Take ten men, bring powder up from the magazine to my cabin and to the wardroom. Keep the fire away from there until we are ready to abandon the ship. Can you do this?”
“Yes, sir! If I cannot, I will report it to you quickly.”
“Good man.”
It was too late to repent that he had allowed the crew to become so lax in their daily routine as to leave their bedding lying about to catch fire. If he lived through this, he resolved to become a terror of daily discipline and cleanliness among his next crew
, and he could cite this moment in evidence.
He heard White bellow, “Fire!” and so had a second to brace himself for the wall of flame and smoke that poured out from their starboard side and the clapping booms of the guns. He took a second to look through his glass at the steamer to see if any of the shots took effect. He saw three strikes, one in her cabin, one low on her port side so she might take on some water, and one hole in her hull too far forward to be of consequence. If they could hit her steam drum, it would end her game, but the paramount need of the moment were the boats pulling after his own men swimming for the shore.
Bliven stole a quick glance through his glass at the beach and saw it thick now with people, women with their hands at the bills of their bonnets, the men shouting and gesturing all their encouragement.
He felt a wave of dizziness sweep over him and knew that his malarial fever was bidding to assert itself, but he could not have it at this moment. If it was in him at all to summon such a force of will as to beat back whatever debilitating humors were the cause of his disease, it must be now. Bliven loped forward to find the crew at the starboard bow chaser. “Boys, are you loaded?”
“Yes, sir,” saluted the gun captain.
“With solid shot?”
“Yes, sir.”
He steadied himself with a few deep breaths as he thought, Good. Very good. If they first fired a ball at the leading boat, perhaps the Mexicans would realize that he meant business and they would pull back toward their ship without all of them being cut to pieces. They were able to turn the gun until it pointed broad on the starboard bow, still a good distance from his men swimming toward shore. He pointed the gun himself. “Crow it up,” he ordered. “Get the quoin in there.”
